What could possibly go wrong?

As with most NHS projects it will over budget and delivered 20 years after the fact.

Or just [1]make things shorter by using Excel ...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronavirus_contact_error/

Real-time surveillance in a system where it takes a week to get a GP's appointment?

The public-private partnership in this case appears to be NHS collects the data at public expense, gives the data for free to the private side so they can say "Ooo an outbreak! Looks like you need to buy these drugs from us that we developed with the data you gave us!"

Who came up with this idea, Wes Streeting?

In this case it involves a British company making some sequencers, this seems like a fairly sensible partnership.

The UK government supporting a company making a new form of sequencer seems to make a lot of sense. Much of today's genomic work is done using [1]technology invented in the UK (Solexa) which got sold off and now an American company is making loads from it...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumina_dye_sequencing

And how exactly would they prevent them? We don't have anything in the arsenal to actually make that happen.

And how exactly would they prevent them? We don't have anything in the arsenal to actually make that happen.

We absolutely do.

We know you can prevent respiratory infections with masks and good ventilation. Also, you can lower the time a disease spreads using isolation of individuals or populations.

We also have a number of antibiotics and anti-virals that might be effective against future pathogens. We have the technology to rapidly "screen" all approved drugs against pathogens (obviously clinical trials would then be needed to check they work in the real world).

"using isolation of individuals or populations."

Ordering another lockdown will still be a political decision. Doesn't matter how clever the medical tech is if its left to some muppet in govt to over- or under-react.

It's not clever med-tech we need, it's clever people. Interesting that in situations where there's a nutter with a gun wandering around a shopping centre people don't need telling twice to stop shopping and run for cover but when there's a disease that could kill them just as dead then they find any excuse under the sun for their human right to go shopping not to be taken away from them.

Masks haven't been shown to work - see Cochrane for the best evidence that they don't seem to do very much with viruses.

You can't simply magic up "good ventilation" everywhere. And it would need to be everywhere pretty much to be effective enough.

Isolation (you mean lockdown?) didn't actually work last time, not sure why you think it would work next time.

Anti-virals? You are kidding with me now, right?

Take a look at [1]This substack for a nice long series explaining that whole fiasco.

And antibiotics? So, you're talking about a bacterial pandemic? I guess that one might work.

The arsenal still looks pretty bare from where I'm standing.

[1] https://trusttheevidence.substack.com/p/the-story-of-antivirals-against-influenza-fef

Is behind a paywall.

"We know you can prevent respiratory infections with masks and good ventilation...."

All true but significant numbers of the population are more likely to believe a post written by who the fuck knows regarding masks, vaccines, social distancing, drugs, severity, etc. than anything recommended by what they would call "so-called experts". All the good stuff in your post can be wiped out simply by the non-compliance of a significant number of fuckwit idiots who believe that disease control measures are simply a trick by the government to mind-control them.

Society is turning into the schoolyard where the clever kids get shouted down and bullied by the bigger idiots.

Knowing that there is a problem is the first and essential step to finding a solution.

I'm deeply disappointed by the knee-jerk negativity of the earlier comments. This is a major success story for British science. Fast DNA sequencing of clinical samples from patients during the pandemic allowed the UK to track mutations in the COVID-19 virus as new strains emerged, and that fed into the public health response, as well as enabling more effective versions of the vaccines to be developed within months, rather than years.

Even before the pandemic, rapid DNA sequencing of clinical samples in NHS hospitals, combined with techniques developed in British universities and research institutes, allowed doctors to more effectively control the spread of outbreaks of MRSA and other nasty bacteria in hospitals.

So instead of doing down some excellent British science which will benefit all of us, let's celebrate it.

Absolutely true, as it's coming up to 9AM in the UK have a breakfast pint.

It's not so much disbelief in the technology, it's the hyping to impossibility that's the issue.

"Real-time" for instance. Nothing will be done until a patient presents, which means either they have to collapse and get taken to A&E or they have to get a GP appointment. Neither is real-time, Then, unless the test, is run on the spot the sample has to go to the lab. In the hospital it can go fairly quickly but the GP probably has a once-a-day collection.

Then "surveillance". That means very widespread usage. Is there going to be a Nanopore system at every hospital and GP I don't think that's going to happen. Actually, when "surveillance" was mentioned I thought it might be a monitoring of viral DNA in sewage which is surveillance but you then have the problem of identifying the DNA as pathogenic.

Then there's the belief that, having detected a potential pandemic causing virus (an that's a long step from finding new virus strains) that a suitable treatment or vaccine can be whistled up in short order. Remember that, even with the urgency of the pandemic allowing for protocols to be telescoped, the clinical trials for the A-Z vaccine took some months.

There's also the problem that NHS has shown a somewhat cavalier approach to data handling and in particular will remain tainted with the Register readership as long as it has dealing with Palantir because of the latter's reputation. Trust is the issue here and once lost it's not easy to rebuild so anything which involves handling of data on a large scale is going to be regarded with utmost suspicion. That's deeply unfortunate but we are where we are and that's where successive government initiatives have put us.

Nanopore Technologies products are not intended for use for health assessment or to diagnose, treat, mitigate, cure, or prevent any disease or condition.

From their website